The Un-Green Internet? Paperless Is Not Carbon-less

So you've gone virtually paperless. You've canceled your magazine subscriptions, you jot notes on your IPhone, you pay all your bills online. Your home, and your home office, is a model of pristine efficiency. You're feeling pretty good about your personal carbon footprint. But did you ever stop and realize that every second you spend browsing the web creates carbon emissions?

That's several thousand milligrams by the time you finish reading this blog post, according to an article on CNN. Some studies show that the internet will produce 20% of the world's greenhouse gases in 10 years, especially true if the energy used to power your computer comes from a coal power plant. Servers, like Google, are working on greening their services. There's the trade-off of course: browsing the web certainly creates fewer carbon emissions than driving to the library to look up the same information in a paper book, the energy used to recycle paper bills or even the energy used to deliver those bills across town. For more details, click here.